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President Trump, like many of his predecessors, finds himself mired in the Middle East against his will. At some point, the energy transition will make the Middle East less central to global security than it has been for the past eighty years. Yet, the present war with Iran makes clear just how much the Middle East remains deeply tied to the world’s security and the world’s economy.
The United States has an unusually broad array of choices to make in the Middle East in the next eighteen months, and those choices will be read globally as an indicator of US intentions and US strategic coherence. The most important choices fall into three categories. The first set of choices has to do with regional security, the second with shifts in bilateral relationships with longtime partners, and the third with reconstruction. All involve large-scale investments, and they are interrelated.
Regional security
Decision: Pursue a “skinny” or broad deal with Iran?
The United States and Iran have had mostly tense relations since the 1979 revolution, and the 2026 war was a consequence of longstanding US government concerns about Iranian actions that threaten US allies and partners in the Middle East: its presumed nuclear weapons program, its missile arsenal, and its robust proxy network. When the Obama administration negotiated the JCPOA in 2015, it made several choices. First, it decided that the negotiating effort would be multilateral and that the United States would focus only on Iran’s proliferation threat. The underlying idea was that success on the proliferation file would build confidence to handle the two other files with greater ease.
The Trump administration walked away from the JCPOA in 2018, and in the current conflict, it has an understandable temptation to broaden the agenda. Hamas carried out the October 7, 2023, attacks on Israel, and the Houthis blocked Bab al-Mandeb in solidarity; both are Iranian proxies. Meanwhile, Lebanese Hezbollah continues to attack Israeli targets and pro-Iranian militias continue to challenge Iraqi sovereignty. Ignoring Iran’s sustained threats to regional security in the wake of those actions seems foolhardy. In addition, it is hard to ignore Iran’s ballistic missile capabilities after Iran so aggressively attacked Israel and its Gulf neighbors, both in the leadup to the current war and during the present war itself.
Finally, Iran’s newfound ability to blockade the Persian Gulf, even in its present weakened state, poses an enduring threat to global commerce. Any agreement to end the war will surely seek to ensure that doesn’t happen again.
The array and urgency of Iranian threats would make a “narrow deal” on proliferation with Iran appear unsatisfactory to many. Yet a comprehensive deal would be especially hard to strike. Iran perceives itself as ascendant, having withstood a massive US and Israeli assault and held the Strait of Hormuz hostage for more than three months. It also sees the United States as relatively isolated, lacking support not only from both Russia and China (which it had in 2015) but also from Europe. A comprehensive deal would require the kind of painstaking negotiations for which the Trump administration has shown little appetite in its first eighteen months. The more sweeping a prospective deal is, the less likely it is to result in an agreement.
While some sort of extended ceasefire appears to be within reach, the Trump administration will need to decide how ambitious to be in the intermediate term. It is both a political and strategic decision.
Decision: Build a regional order, or let it fragment?
In the wake of the conflict with Iran, the US government will have three sets of choices to make about regional security issues. The first is how much effort it will make to invest in a broader regional security architecture.
Successive US administrations have pursued efforts to bolster regional cooperation, both on the Arab side of the Gulf and more broadly (partly with Iran, and partly with Israel). The Iran war has boosted existing tensions between Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and Gulf states have sharply differing views about how much to deter Iran and how much to accommodate it. The US government will need to decide whether rivalries within the Gulf are a local matter, or if they spill over to threaten energy security, nonproliferation efforts, or broader regional stability.
It will also need to decide if security is advanced by having Israel and even Iran more deeply embedded in regional forums, similar to the OSCE or perhaps ASEAN, and what relationship such efforts should have to mini-lateral efforts such as the Abraham Accords.
Decision: Prioritize regional nonproliferation efforts?
The second is how much to prioritize nonproliferation in the Middle East. Israel is presumed to be the region’s only nuclear weapons state. The UAE has a robust civilian nuclear program (governed under a 123 agreement), Russian contractors are building a nuclear plant on Egypt’s Red Sea coast, and Saudi Arabia has been actively exploring nuclear power for more than a decade. Saudi Arabia is widely thought to have access to nuclear weapons in extremis through its close relationship with Pakistan, although that proposition has never been tested. It is conceivable that, in the aftermath of the Iran war, one or more states will decide, covertly or overtly, to pursue their own nuclear deterrent.
Past US administrations have considered nonproliferation efforts to be a vital part of regional strategy, but should future ones? What should the US government be willing to do to prevent a government from crossing the nuclear weapons threshold? While out of the scope of this essay, it is worth considering what the US government should do if other states do become nuclear powers, and whether US policy would differ depending on the sequence of proliferation.
Decision: Maintain the military footprint or pull back?
The third regional security issue is how much to invest in regional defense, as well as in the broader principle of freedom of navigation. The first has been relatively straightforward for decades. The United States has grown ever-more-deeply committed to the security of Israel for three-quarters of a century, and it replaced the UK as the external security guarantor of the Gulf in 1971. As Gulf states grew wealthy in the 1970s and 1980s, hundreds of billions of dollars of purchases of US arms drove correspondingly deeper US security investments. The United States led a forty-one-country coalition to repel Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait and left a durable presence scattered among bases throughout the region. While several Gulf states have asked for formal mutual defense treaties, none are in place. Governments and opinion leaders privately criticized the United States in recent years for not coming to their aid when Iranian proxies fired missiles and drones into their territory, and publicly acted to show the US government their displeasure.
Beyond the security of individual countries, American presidents have been eager to lighten the US footprint in the Middle East for a decade and a half, as counterterrorism efforts combined with ongoing operations in Iraq and Afghanistan to create seemingly endless demand signals for urgent response. As those missions ended, President Trump has turned to questioning whether a major naval presence in the Middle East is central to US security. He has been quite outspoken about how relatively little US trade passes through the Strait of Hormuz, and in his first term, he argued that countries such as China and Japan got much of their oil from there, “So why are we protecting the shipping lanes for other countries (many years) for zero compensation?” More recently, in April 2026, he argued that the beneficiaries of trade through the strait should pay the cost of securing it.
A similar argument might be made about Red Sea navigation through Bab al-Mandeb, where the United States is a source or destination of even less direct trade. Both of these waterways are key chokepoints for the world, and their interruption has profound effects on Asia, Europe, and Africa. But that is not the same as saying that they are US responsibilities, or that they need to be in the future.
One can imagine the US government deciding that protecting the global commons advances its influence, both through direct US presence and through coordinating the efforts of others. Alternatively, the Navy may reduce its efforts to protect sea lanes in the Middle East, either as a way to focus US resources on areas more central to the US economy, or as a pressure point on other countries to step up their own efforts and/or compensate the United States for its efforts. That could mean, for example, rolling back the activities of the Combined Maritime Forces operating out of Bahrain, which involves five US-led naval task forces that enlist forty-seven countries, and also reducing the US naval presence in Manama.
As Iran has damaged several US bases in the current conflict, the US government will need to decide what facilities should be repaired and rebuilt, and what should be abandoned.
Key bilateral relationships
Decision: Reshape the Israel relationship?
The political consensus around Israel in the United States is splintering, and criticism of the bilateral relationship is growing on both the left and the right. Elections in the United States and Israel in the fall of 2026 may recast ties, especially if Democrats critical of Israel win a majority in Congress or Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition falls, and Israel’s new leaders take an approach that reassures more Americans. In the midst of this uncertainty, the memorandum of understanding governing the current ten-year aid package expires in 2028 and is being renegotiated. Prime Minister Netanyahu has called for a reshaping of the bilateral relationship, moving away from aid and toward joint investment and joint production of military hardware, but he may not be in power when a new MoU is agreed to.
The US government will need to decide how much to tie itself to Israel. While most Republicans are not troubled by Israel’s approach to its adversaries, non-interventionists in the United States are critical of sustained and open-ended commitments to Israel. An expensive, jointly planned Iran intervention that has failed to produce the desired strategic effects has sharpened their concern.
Most Democrats (and especially younger Democrats) have deep misgivings about Israeli military actions, especially toward Palestinians. There is a rising debate in the United States about how closely the United States should tie itself to Israel’s permanent war footing, its current reluctance to embrace negotiations to resolve its conflicts, and its expectation of American support throughout.
As a complicating feature, US and Israeli officials have periodically clashed over Israel’s transfer of US military technology to China. While management of this concern has improved, a surge in cooperation developing advanced military technologies would require robust provisions to ensure they do not leak to US adversaries.
The question is not whether the US-Israel relationship will change, but instead what role the US government will take reshaping it. A more self-confident Israel, independent of US aid and enmeshed in joint military production, could prove a stronger partner but also a less manageable one. That could pose challenges for the United States on a wide variety of issues, from technology transfer to China to advancing a settlement with the Palestinians.
Decision: Insist on Gulf alignment, or accept strategic hedging?
The United States has another set of choices to make with regard to the Gulf Arab states. Many of the royal families in the Gulf supported British regional hegemony beginning in the 1820s, and they supported American hegemony since the British withdrawal east of Suez in 1971. Yet, looking forward, many of these countries are exploring a different sort of relationship with external powers.
In part, as their economies (and populations) grew, they see themselves as global entrepots that have outgrown dependence on any single country. The most articulate spokesman for this orientation has been UAE presidential adviser Anwar Gargash, who said in 2022,
The UAE has no interest in “choosing sides” between great powers. . . . We are ever conscious that in diversity lies both strength and autonomy. We will continue to pursue balanced and diversified strategic and economic relations with world powers.
In the past decade, the UAE has sought to deepen its relations with the United States, China, and Russia simultaneously, despite rising tensions between them. Saudi Arabia has seemed to shift its focus several times between growing US ties and China ties in the same period. For many of these countries, diversifying both economic ties and weapons sources is common sense. For the United States, willingly embedding Chinese technology into these countries’ growing economic and technological infrastructure represents a security threat. This is especially true in the field of artificial intelligence, where Saudi Arabia and the UAE are making especially large investments, and where the United States seeks to create a firewall between US and Chinese technology.
A Gulf instinct for hedging is exacerbated by Gulf states’ wondering whether US protection is adequate. Doubts had been rising in the wake of the Arab Spring and in the face of Houthi (or purportedly Houthi) missile attacks in recent years, but they have shot up in the wake of the ongoing US war with Iran. Many governments argue that they have borne the brunt of an Iranian response to an ill-considered US effort, while some commentators have complained that the United States was focused on protecting Israel rather than protecting them. At least some have concluded they need to further diversify their relationships.
For the United States, pouring resources into increasingly nonaligned countries may be a less attractive proposition. The Gulf’s attraction may diminish further if governments find their efforts to recover from the Iran war (both in terms of direct damage, but also in terms of attracting continued foreign investment ) curtails what Trump claimed to be their promise to invest $6 trillion in the United States. If so, Trump becomes more likely to conclude, as he did in his first term, that “fighting and policing” in the Middle East cost the United States $8 trillion, and that going into the region is “the worst decision ever made in the history of our country.”
Reconstruction
Beyond security architecture and bilateral ties, the United States faces a third category of choices: how to approach reconstruction across three distinct conflict zones. Reconstruction needs in the Gulf after the Iran war will pale in comparison to the existing reconstruction needs in the Levant, where conflicts in Gaza, Syria, and Lebanon have ground on for years and displaced millions. While the combined needs of these conflict-affected environments are in the hundreds of billions of dollars, each conflict is different. In each, the US government has hard choices to make about its goals, the scale of its efforts, how it seeks to work with others, and how it seeks to sequence its efforts (both between and within conflicts). None of those answers are obvious.
Many Americans come to reconstruction skeptically, after decades of US-led efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan failed to meet expectations. Yet, Israel’s presence in the midst of these three conflicts (and arguably as a party to all of them) makes it unlikely that the United States will wholly abandon any of them in the near term.
Decision: Embrace ambitious plans anywhere?
The first choice for US officials is how ambitious to be. On Gaza, for example, President Trump laid out a vision suggesting Gaza could become the “Riviera of the Middle East” with an international effort under US leadership. It would take years of effort and involve the United States deeply in the plan’s economic, social, political, and security components. In comparison, a much more modest effort to create a “Trump economic zone” that was mooted for southern Lebanon relies on Saudi and Qatari money to create jobs for disarmed Hezbollah fighters. The scope and scale of the efforts is profoundly different, as is the US role. Is there anywhere that the United States should commit billions of dollars in reconstruction? What happens if it does not, and what impact does that have on US national security?
Decision: Lead reconstruction, or just let it unfold?
The second choice for US officials is how closely to work with others. In the past, the United States has played a leading role funding reconstruction projects, and it often has had a direct hand in their execution. This is partly a consequence of the size of the US economy, but also the expertise that the US government has had in-house. Deep cuts in the US foreign assistance budget and to USAID have signaled both less US interest and less US capacity to engage in this set of activities. Yet, there is no obvious successor to the US role. The Trump administration has been skeptical of the United Nations and its agencies, as well as toward many European allies; both have had some experience in this kind of work. While some wealthier states in the region have dollars, they lack the staff and expertise to execute ambitious efforts. What blend of leadership and partnership should the United States embrace? How different is the answer in each conflict? What lessons should we take from the Board of Peace’s efforts in Gaza thus far to shape the US approach to Gaza and the other reconstruction efforts?
Decision: Manage sequencing deliberately, or seize opportunities as they arise?
The third choice is what to do when. Partly this is about balancing the ripeness of each conflict to deeper US engagement with its importance to US interests. For example, Syria’s unified government and its focus on investment may make it seem the most promising, but with a now-diminished jihadi threat, it appears the most peripheral of the three conflicts to US interests. Gaza has been a focus of US attention, but it is considerably less promising at the moment. Prime Minister Netanyahu recently announced that Israel would move from controlling 53 percent of Gaza to 70 percent as a way to put greater pressure on Hamas, which has neither disarmed nor surrendered power. Lebanon has a government keen to partner with the United States, but the government has limited control over the large swaths of the country where Hezbollah is strong.
But sequencing also concerns the various tasks of reconstruction. While the overall goal is to end conflict, establish legitimate local leaders, and coordinate allies’ contributions to the financial and capital costs of reconstruction, doing so requires security, disarmament, and demobilization, and rule of law, in addition to the physical tasks of reconstruction. All of these tasks are interrelated and call for coordinating with local partners and fellow donors alike, all while keeping adversaries from fouling the process. With a reduced institutional capacity to pursue this work, how strong a voice will the United States have on how reconstruction proceeds, how strong a voice will it seek, and how will it secure its interests?
Conclusion
Even if the United States were to prioritize rapidly scaling down its Middle East commitments, it would need to make hard choices about its commitment to regional security, the future of its closest regional partnerships, and what role, if any, it should play helping war-torn areas rebuild. None of those issues exists in isolation. A narrow deal with Iran would shape possibilities for both Lebanese reconstruction and how Gulf Arab states approach the United States; the future of US bases in the Gulf will color how those Gulf states think about their ties to Beijing. If the United States does not make these choices with strategic intent, others will make choices for it. Partners will find alternatives, adversaries will fill vacuums, and the momentum of current trends will foreclose opportunities.
US allies in Europe and Asia will read US actions in the Middle East carefully. Partly, they are deeply exposed to the region through both energy and general trade, and they all have deep Middle Eastern interests. But they will also see how the United States acts in the Middle East as previews for how Washington will navigate the next crisis closer to their own borders. Does the United States defend partners under armed assault? Is the United States committed to defending the global commons? Is the United States merely another large state looking after its own interests, or is it different?
The answer will come out of the Middle East, and it will resonate around the world.
Jon B. Alterman holds the Zbigniew Brzezinski Chair in Global Security and Geostrategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Before assuming his current role, he led the CSIS Middle East program for more than twenty years and was a senior vice president at CSIS for more than a decade.